The Fight Over the Debt Ceiling Is Dangerous and Dumb. That’s a Bad Combination.

The debt ceiling should simply be abolished as it serves no actual purpose

At this point, everyone knows that getting anything done in the US Senate requires navigating a series of arcane and arbitrary rules that have accumulated over the years. The most important of those are the rules that govern what kinds of bills can be passed via majority vote and which can be filibustered (meaning they need 60 votes to pass). These rules are not laid out in the Constitution. They’re rules the Senate has imposed on itself. And at the moment, the GOP is using these rules to threaten to force the U.S. government to default on its debt.

These rules are undemocratic and dumb. And they’re currently at the heart of the battle in the Senate over the US government’s debt ceiling — which is itself one of the dumber aspects of the way the government works. So this is an extraordinarily dumb fight for senators to be wasting their time on. And yet that’s exactly what’s happening.

The debt limit is, as its name suggests, a ceiling on the amount of money the government can borrow. But having a debt limit does not stop the federal government from taking on financial obligations, like payments to Social Security recipients and veterans benefits or interest payments on its past debt. It just prevents the federal government from borrowing the money it needs to meet those obligations. In other words, what the debt ceiling does is prevent the government from paying for bills it’s already racked up, and spending Congress has already authorized.

What this means is that if Congress were to not raise or suspend the debt ceiling, the government would have to stop paying its bills and default on its debt. That’s why every time we’ve gotten close to hitting the debt ceiling in the past, Congress has, in the end, voted to temporarily suspend it or to raise it permanently. The consequences of not doing so — including a lower credit rating for the US and higher interest rates, with collateral damage to the economy as a whole — are too great.

Everyone in Washington understands this (or should understand it), and therefore understands that the debt ceiling has to be raised or…